The educational tragedy is not solved with Chicanas

by time news

“The contempt for public education of the government of Mauricio Macri He took us to a historic apartment. The 2019 evaluations show the damage inflicted by the divestment in the area, “he said. Gabriela Cerruti, the government spokeswoman, moments after the disastrous results of the educational evaluation of Argentine students were known in a study that was carried out in 2019 by the Latin American Laboratory for Evaluation of the Quality of Education (LLECE), carried out by the Regional Office of Education for Latin America and the Caribbean from UNESCO.

That the spokesperson speaks without knowing or being truthful should not surprise us, it is the same one who said recently that the reserves “are robust” just before the government announced a stocks to finance tourist packages abroad, but what it really hurts is that it is established as an opinion of the entire government, where it is assumed that people who are trained or, at least informed, to understand that the results of the CERCE 2019 tests they are not only due to the responsibility of the Macri government. It is not necessary to carry out any special or detailed investigation: it is enough to review the results of the international educational evaluation tests in which Argentina participates, such as the PISA or those of UNESCO, to realize that our country has been backward for more than two decades in terms of the educational quality that our students receive.

The PISA tests are usually reviled by sectors linked to the teaching unions, close to Kirchnerism. They are spoken of as “standardized” assessments that contribute little to reality because they are designed by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) because they are designed for developed countries, but, nevertheless, almost 80 countries from all continents participate in it, even from Latin America, where Argentina went from leading the region in 2000 to being relegated behind Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica and Colombia and almost paired with Peru, when 21 years ago we were above them all. And that was seen in each of the tests carried out in the years 2000, 2006, 2009, 2012 and 2018.

Also in the LLECE tests, a Latin American test designed for primary school students in the region, Argentina demonstrated either a setback or the lack of progress, since 1996 when they began to be taken in different modalities: PERCE, SERCE, TERCE, much more if take into account the progress of other neighboring countries, such as Chile and Uruguay and a little further, Costa Rica and Cuba, who used to lead the region when he participated. In this last edition, the growth of The Savior, a country that went through a war and that in the peace treaties had to agree to incorporate community schools, created autonomously by families in the absence of the State to educate their children. Even from that very complicated starting point, they improved markedly, while our country, with a robust, inclusive educational system, with one of the largest state investments in education, close to 6% of GDP, failed to demonstrate any or considerable improvements in the last two decades.

Our country, with a robust, inclusive educational system, with one of the largest state investments in education, close to 6% of GDP, failed to demonstrate some or considerable improvements in the last two decades.

And that has consequences. Product of the high union conflict, of the existing problems to guarantee a normal performance of the school cycle, many families left the public school and began a progressive exodus of students towards private schools, whose enrollment went from 23.8% in 2002 to 28 % in 2013. There are scary examples: in the province of Santa Cruz this year students finish middle school who, due to union problems or the closure of schools due to a pandemic, in the last 5 years attended class half of the days that corresponded to them.

In addition, half of the students who manage to finish middle school lack reading comprehension. It is worth remembering that three years ago the Common Basic Cycle of the UBA dictated literacy courses to accompany students who were trying to pursue an undergraduate degree in which they could not understand a necessary text. It was an unprecedented event.

In the last 20 years, the most important laws in education have been enacted, such as the same National Education Law O Educational Financing Law and up to the Law of 180 days of class. None of them are met or did not meet the objectives set. The failure to comply with the existing regulations on education is resounding. For example, in 2010, we were supposed to have 3 out of 10 elementary schools full-time, and 11 years later we didn’t reach half of that goal.

There are other serious problems that affect Argentine educational quality, ranging from infrastructure and maintenance problems to teacher training itself. The deterioration is already dangerous and conspicuous; We are going through a true educational tragedy that, with the consequences of the long process of closed schools during the pandemic, which disengaged more than a million students from school and significantly lowered learning due to the extensive attempt to educate at a distance, something For what the school, the teachers and the families were not prepared for, the worst moment of the rich history of our education will leave us as a balance.

To top it all, we come from two electoral campaigns this year where there was little talk about education. And this is not the first time that it has happened, which raises questions about whether education is of interest to our leadership and whether there is a real social demand on it.

For all this, the last thing Argentina needs is to put the educational problem inside the crack, looking for blame in an unfounded way in the other and permanently so as not to take charge of the present and recent history. Perhaps the government spokesperson does not remember it, but in the 21 years that we have been in this century, Argentina had, and has, Peronist governments for 15 years.

Because if the solution is to deliberately point out, in a selfish search for political gain, it is possible that in that action they will only find themselves in front of a mirror that fully returns the responsibility for the failure they seek to deposit.

Education is too big a problem to solve with such political trifles.

You may also like

Leave a Comment